Going back to
the early 15th century we find the first references about
club and ball makers from Holland. The game being played
at this time was called "colf". Records show
that the Scots have been importing balls from across
the North Sea literally by the barrel-load as long ago
as 1496.

The Dutch golf players originally played
with wodden balls made out of elm or beech. These
balls had negligible aerodynamic properties. Gradually,
they adopted a ball made of white leather and filled
with cow's hair which was used in the local game
of kaatsen (hand tennis). It is possible the kaatsen
ball later inspired the Scots to invent the "feathery" sometime
in the 17th or early 18th century as a subsitute
for the wooden ball which was probably the popular
ball of choice of the day.

15th century and before

Feathery
Balls

15th century

gourlay feathery

It is tempting to assume that
all of the great tech stuff happened after we found out how
to make beach sand into microchips. But with a pastime as
ancient as golf, something must have clicked early on or
it never would have survived this long. That hook may well
have been the Featherie golf ball, perfected by the Dutch
around five or six hundred years ago from a basic technique
used for game balls in ancient Rome. They would stuff a hatful
of wet feathers into a wet inch-and-a-half leather pouch,
sew it up, and let it dry. The feathers would expand, and
the leather would shrink, creating a ball as hard as... well,
a golf ball. This made for a very resilient and lively projectile,
especially when compared to the wooden balls used previously.

The featherie performed remarkably well
on the links, as evidenced by a recorded drive of 361
yards by Samuel Messieux in 1836, at the Old Course in
St. Andrews! Sure, it was just skin and bird hair, but
it was still a quantum leap by any measure, sort of the
transistor of golf balls. For more than 400 years, it
was the ball of choice. That is, if you could afford
it. These ball's extravagant cost (the best ballmakers
could produce only four or five per day) sealed their
ultimate fate when the cheap "guttie" ball
appeared around 1850.

Gotta
Percha Balls

Gutta Percha is a rubber-like
material that comes from the dried sap of sapodilla trees
of East Asia. It was the major product used for golf ball
manufacture from around 1848 well into the 1900ís. The term
is erroneously used for caoutchouc bookbinding as gutta percha
was tried and found to be unsuitable. Gutta percha now seems
to be used in dentristy.

The introduction in 1848 of the
gutta percha ball (or often called the "gutty")
did an enormous amount to restore golf as a genuinely popular
game. Gutta percha is a gum which is tapped from a tree indigenous
to Malaya. The substance is malleable when bolied in water
and it becomes hard on cooling. Soon over time, the "gutty" became
the ball of choice, not so much to the greater distance which
can be attained with the "gutty" but rather because
of its cheaper price. The process involved in the manufacturing
of the "gutty" was a great deal simplier and its
price was about a quarter that of the price of the feathery.
The "gutty" cost about 1 shilling a ball in the
1850s. It was in this age when golf in Britain became more
of a game for everyone. The increased leisure time created
by the prosperity of the Industrial Revolution was another
vital ingredient that enabled the sport to catch the imagination
of the nation.

approx. 1860

The "gutty" was prone
to break up in mid-air, thus forcing the rules to accommodate
this tendency by allowing the golfer to play a fresh ball
from the point where the largest fragment had come to rest.
This would be the last occasion on which the Rules of Golf
had to be amended to legislate for the properties of the
golf ball. For the remainder of the 19th century, the new
ball was repeatedly modified to make it more durable. Its
outer shell was indented was a hammer after it was observed
that the ball flew better when it has been cut or marked
than in its smooth pristine state.

Wound
Balls

As quickly as the gutty came on
the scene, it was soon superseded. In 1901, the rubber-cored
ball made its British debut. It was the invention of the
fledgling American golf equipment industry. The idea belonged
to Coburn Haskell, an employee of the Goodrich Tyre and Rubber
Company in Ohio. Elastic thread was wound around a rubber
core under extreme tension and then encased in a patterned
outer cover of gutta percha. The Haskell ball initially had
its skeptics until in 1902 where people were shown what a
difference the ball made to the best players when Sandy Herd
played four rounds at the Royal Liverpool course in 307 to
beat the great Harry Vardon and James Braid by a shot. Herd
used the Haskell ball for all 72 holes and he was the only
man in the field to play with one.

From that moment, the Haskell ball has
been improved to such an effect that it spawned a host
of dicta from the R & A and USGA, the dual arbiters
of the integrity of the sport. In 1920, they agreed the
ball should weigh no more than 1.62 ounces and have a
diameter of not less than 1.62 inches. From January 1931
however, the USGA turned its back on the collective agreement
and introduced the "big ball", a ball having
a minimum size of 1.68 inches and a maximum weight of
1.55 ounces. A year later, they raised the weight stipulation
to 1.62 ounces. Subsequent attempts to settle for a uniform
ball of 1.66 inches failed but finally, the USGA standard
was also adopted elsewhere. The Professional Golfer's
Association (PGA) in Great Britian was swayed by people
who attributed the American dominance of golf to their
usage of the big ball. It announced in 1968 that it was
to experiment with the bigger ball of 1.68 inches in
its tournaments. Soon it became mandatory. In 1974, the
R & A made the big ball compulsory for the Open Championship.
Under the rule revisions that came into effect in 1988,
the R & A outlawed the small ball altogether